applets should be either killed off or revamped to be made better (taking a direction similar to flash wouldn't hurt) they are horribly slow, incompatible with different browser and give java a bad name

you just have to look at java.com front page, they are not using a java applet but flash!

applets should be either killed off or revamped to be made better (taking a direction similar to flash wouldn't hurt) they are horribly slow, incompatible with different browser and give java a bad name

So what are you guys saing... that making games for Applets is a NO-NO!? I have been fiddling with a Game-Core engine in 2D that renders to a JPanel and that is easily wrapped in an applet or an JFrame making it an Application.

Is that not the way to go, if I want to make small java-games? I have not tested the applets under different Os/broswers but it seems to push the load I want it to. Running on atleast 50fps in a 320*240 screen. with a graphic-load that one could assume from a small game.

No, it's just that applets have lost the edge over competitors in many ways. The most important being probably how they're perceived from the user's point of view and (because?) there's still no up to date JRE on many systems.That said, I think most people still prefer applets over JWS.

Well, that and the fact that their authoring tool has been in development for over 10 years has a bit to do with Flash's popularity What is interestign though, speaking to a few developers working on casual games, is that they feel that Flash is starting to die off a bit. Interesting.

Flash is only good for animation. Games are limited in Flash due to the antialiased vector-based graphics that give all Flash apps a 'cartoon' look. Granted it's libraries are a bit faster (rotating objects in Flash is cake compared to AffineTransform), but the ActionScript language itself is all but broken. It has gone through some enhancements, and ActionScript 2.0 is OO friendly, but code organization is crippled because you often have to insert code into different frames in the timeline. I've wasted hours sometimes looking for code that's in one of the 1000 animation frames x_X!

Some Flash devs argue that you can use bitmaps for the entire game, which is true.. but you don't have superior control of how or when tiles or sprites are drawn - all you can do is move the graphics onto the scene. Not to mention Flash doesn't have any support for real-time 3D rendering. You can use something like Swift3D which exports a static non-interactive 3D animation into frames of 2D vectors. Flash doesn't come close to supporting textures, lighting, etc...

This entire post is based on Flash MX 2004, so there may be some new enhancements in Flash 8 that prove me wrong

I pretty much agree with princec here, except in my experience, applets execute slower. Start-up times with Flash and Java are miles apart; Flash will boot up in a split second, but the JRE takes a few seconds and sometimes freezes he computer a bit.

As far as rendering speed... applets are only faster depending on the developer, really. The Java2D library is much slower than Flash (like I said before about AffineTransform). Flash devs don't have to worry about little niptucks (hw accelerated images, etc.) here and there in their code to see a comfortable speed boost.

A little off topic, but when you compare both platforms, there's one thing about Java and Flash that sets them apart: fullscreen. Flash supports it, but Java supports it better (and faster). Java's rendering speed in fullscreen can top some C++ apps. Flash hasn't optimized fullscreen enough to impress me. It doesn't give you control of the resolution, bit depth, etc...

To conclude my ramble, if there's one feature in Flash that I would love to see in Java, it's the superior FPS control. In Flash you can just set the FPS property and the movie will adjust accordingly. Java is a bit more reliable now that we have things like GAGETimer and 1.5's nanoTime(), but it took a while for that reliabilty to become available ;P

But I'm going to get off on that. That's more of comparing platforms than comparing applets. Blah3 is right, you can't compare a flash applet and a java applet due to their seperate purposes. But you can compare their platforms. Flash already has a standard GUI, it has recently gotten into networking (besides just loading XML files), and other features that don't fit the common animation. I doubt the Flash platform will ever be as application-friendly as Java, but we'll have to see.

Ideaworks (the group that later made Tomb Raider for mobile phones) used to make commercial 3rd-party 3D renderers for macromedia stuff, amongst the many other products they have had in their history. Unless I'm going senile and am completely wrong - I may be thinking of a different company. I never used the API myself, I just saw it in their offices and in other people's apps.

Really, what I'm saying is that Flash is rather like java, as noted by woogley - it's a platform. It controls other code. You can't really slate it in the way you were trying to. Like java, which does not come with a free 3D card but is able to pump instructions to one, flash has been extended many times to add new functionality that lets it control other apps, libs, etc.

Can you really compare Java to Flash?! That's like comparing apples to pears isn't it. Java is a OOP language, while flash is something of a programmable 2D-animation system. Perhaps you could develop a huge system upon that system to simulate something of a OOP language that we are used of, and even render 3d in some obscure way, rasterizing with Macromedias neat 2D vectorbased system... Really, has that been done? I have tried Swift 3D. A tool that rerendered a 3D image to a 2Drasterisation like flash uses.

The tool was, huge. The result took quite some time to recompute. And the result was ... not more than, plain nice.Are you Really, really sure that there is a 3D engine that does rasterisation like the one on: http://www.idx3d.ch/idx3d/idx3d.html

You can perhaps compare Java to Flash, as of presenting similar content. Interactive Web stuff. But not as OOP platform. There is simply only one contender in that ring, JAVA.

I might be totally wrong. you might say...Flash does have an object oriented mechanism... still make an eventdriven, threaded, subscribing, polymorphed something, with something on top with flash then.

Someone's already done a Java Flash player, and if it uses Java2D and Mustang, it'll be GL accelerated, too.

Someone did? Do you have a link to that implementation? I googled for it but couldn't find anything usefull besides marcomedia's own java api which shipped until flash 5.0 (but which doesn't support anything above flash 2.0)

Quote

wow, have you seen the art galery?

how could they possibly do that? Shocked

Yes im wondering how they managed that too, its one nice software renderer! I remember seeing a quite similar product a while ago: http://www.holomatix.comThe image quality is also striking similar...

While we're comparing Java to Flash I would like to ask what's better, OpenGL or 3D Studio Max?Seriously guys, Java is a full blown language and not a piece fo software that is only suited towards 2D animations.

Java2D is just in a poor state, why in the living hell would someone want to replace Flash with Java2D?It's like having a coder asking his manager to code a database system.Artists are not programmers and programmers are not artists.

java-gaming.org is not responsible for the content posted by its members, including references to external websites,
and other references that may or may not have a relation with our primarily
gaming and game production oriented community.
inquiries and complaints can be sent via email to the info‑account of the
company managing the website of java‑gaming.org